Patch notes are in progress. I love patch notes. They give you great insight into the mind of the developers and the direction that they are wanting to take the game. Having a clear picture of the state of the game and then looking at the big picture of how they are adjusting everything is great. Does it make me a better player? Probably not except that I have more general knowledge about the game. It certainly won't increase my performance in a raid.
It used to be that I got excited about patch notes. When I say excited, I mean that I got fired up. I was frustrated by nerfs and ecstatic over buffs. Often verbally, with great volume, to anyone who would listen. I am not that way anymore. Why not? And why does it matter?
Well, I have been playing WoW for six years. Over the course of six years I have experienced a lot of different changes to the game. I have watched Blizzard ignore problems for months and years. I have watched them fix things the very next day. I have seen the game evolve, killing my class/spec. I have seen patches that make me the most overpowered thing the game has ever seen. Through it all I have gained a few things, one of them being perspective. Another is trust.
I trust the WoW dev team. Over time they have fixed every major issue, balanced every overpowered spec, fixed every glitch, and made solid improvements to every aspect of gameplay. I have also seen a steady increase in speed and accuracy in their ability to solve these problems. They have earned my trust, and I know that they will continue to improve.
So what happens when I am overpowered? I know I will soon be nerfed and just enjoy it while I can. When I am lagging behind it doesn't bother me, I know it will get fixed shortly. The joke 'Soon™' started back when the rare, once-a-quarter blue post hit the forums and nebulously said, "We are aware of the issues and they will be fixed soon." Then months and years went by with no fix and no updates. Everyone quickly became aware of the famous Blizzard use of the word 'soon' and what they really meant by it. Now Blizzard jokes at themselves by using it, and 'Soon™' has turned into a month or two.
This understanding and trust ends up turning into apathy. I read the patch notes diligently, and I care in that I keep myself acutely aware of the state of the game including class/spec specifics for all classes, but I feel entirely apathetic to the feelings of frustration or elation that others may experience when reading the same patch notes. I don't get up in arms about things because I know they will come around, and dealing with an issue in the short term is not a big deal.
This attitude has a great affect on my gameplay. I have to admit that my mood affects my performance. Anyone who claims otherwise is either not self aware or is lying. Morale matters. The apathy that I feel towards the nerf/buff swings in the game allows me to sit back and enjoy playing, untainted by the frustration of a favorite ability getting the nerf bat or my fellow raiders getting buffed to overpowered levels while I sit at the average. I don't suffer form over excitement whereby I make stupid mistakes in a raid because I am inappropriately using a newly overpowered toy. My performance remains more steady, more consistent, and thus allows me to push it ever higher as I perfect my skills and not backslide due to patch note feelings.
For what its worth, I know that this is something that is not available to everyone. Some people are just excitable and they always will be. But if you can become more self aware in this area, and perhaps learn some strategic apathy, it can help your play as well.
Showing posts with label Mindset. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mindset. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
We don't make the same mistake twice
We have acquired a mage, a fury warrior, a resto druid, and a shadow priest. We rejected a prot paladin without professions or enchants and a resto druid that tried to play the "I'm a girl so I should get special treatment" card. We are raiding. Things appear to be going well. So what is the problem? We are stagnating at this stage.
Right now the people that we can find are all super casual or super bad and we only have about six of the ten raid spots filled by regular raiders. The rest of the spots are dragging us down. We have spent hours wiping, kicking the bad players, and finding replacements only to find out that those replacements are also bad. Our regulars are getting frustrated, and rightly so. The server is filled with guilds, all in a similar situation. The sensible thing to do is to get some of those guilds together and fix everyone's problems. That tends to create other problems though.
Usually there are more members than raid spots when bringing two partial raid groups together. Leaders have a hard time deciding to take a back seat and feeling comfortable with someone else driving the boat. Then there is the biggest issue in the minds of your guildies. They like being in your guild. They like who you (as a guild) are. Leaving that behind and going somewhere as a group makes you feel like a group of outsiders in someone else's guild, at least for a while. They may not be able to articulate this concern, but it is there.
So, now we are faced with a few options. We can keep trying to recruit while also trying to hold on to what we have, we can disband and go our separate ways, or we can find somewhere to go. The most attractive option is finding somewhere to go, and there lies the mistake that we don't want to repeat. The guild merger.
Hardcore raiders are expected to make a minimum amount of mistakes, and never the same mistake twice. When you do make a mistake you step back, figure out how and why it happened, and then take direct action to prevent it from happening again. The first time I fought Magmaw I ran away from the Pillar of Flame about one second before the cast, thinking that I could be well out of range and not worry about getting hit by it. Of course it spawned under me... and I was positioned directly in line with where the ranged group was going to run. Now they had to recognize what happened, run around the Pillar of Flame instead of through it, and kite the adds at the same time. It didn't go well, but I was able to step back and look at the situation. The problem got fixed and I have never been out of position for the Pillar of Flame since.
What does that have to do with anything? The same is expected of guild leadership. Make a minimum amount of mistakes and never make the same mistake twice. Well, I made the merger mistake once already. Guild mergers do not work. The newly formed guild always ends up as less than what it was supposed to be, if not outright failing. I have had a lot of time to step back and look at that situation, and I know how to not do it again. Guild acquisition is the way to go.
One guild acquires the raiders, guild bank, FnF members, etc. of the other guild. There is no merger, no blending of the rules and customs, no officership granted to the old GM. One guild makes the decision to disband and transfer control of everything to the other guild. This is smooth, efficient, lacking in drama and lengthy discussion, and best of all it works. Players have it made clear to them that they are not infusing their new guild with the old one, they are leaving the old one behind and joining the new.
Why is that so important? It rallies everyone under the same banner that is already in effect, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel by mashing two guild cultures together and splitting hairs over making policy for future eventualities.
Well, now. What to do with all of that info? A decision still needs to be made. What are we to do? I, for one, am going to work at being the guild that does the acquisition, not the one that gets acquired. The truth of the matter is that I like running things my way. It is smooth, it works well, I don't get complaints, and I get to filter important decisions through my years of experience instead of hoping that the 20 year old college student who has never been outside of his home town and has the life experience of a horse fly gets it right this time. The other side of that coin, though, is that I need to be able to recognize when it is time to let go and move in with the neighboring guild. Will that time come? I hope not, but if it does I will not be drowning in regret. I will be looking forward to the possibilities ahead.
Right now the people that we can find are all super casual or super bad and we only have about six of the ten raid spots filled by regular raiders. The rest of the spots are dragging us down. We have spent hours wiping, kicking the bad players, and finding replacements only to find out that those replacements are also bad. Our regulars are getting frustrated, and rightly so. The server is filled with guilds, all in a similar situation. The sensible thing to do is to get some of those guilds together and fix everyone's problems. That tends to create other problems though.
Usually there are more members than raid spots when bringing two partial raid groups together. Leaders have a hard time deciding to take a back seat and feeling comfortable with someone else driving the boat. Then there is the biggest issue in the minds of your guildies. They like being in your guild. They like who you (as a guild) are. Leaving that behind and going somewhere as a group makes you feel like a group of outsiders in someone else's guild, at least for a while. They may not be able to articulate this concern, but it is there.
So, now we are faced with a few options. We can keep trying to recruit while also trying to hold on to what we have, we can disband and go our separate ways, or we can find somewhere to go. The most attractive option is finding somewhere to go, and there lies the mistake that we don't want to repeat. The guild merger.
Hardcore raiders are expected to make a minimum amount of mistakes, and never the same mistake twice. When you do make a mistake you step back, figure out how and why it happened, and then take direct action to prevent it from happening again. The first time I fought Magmaw I ran away from the Pillar of Flame about one second before the cast, thinking that I could be well out of range and not worry about getting hit by it. Of course it spawned under me... and I was positioned directly in line with where the ranged group was going to run. Now they had to recognize what happened, run around the Pillar of Flame instead of through it, and kite the adds at the same time. It didn't go well, but I was able to step back and look at the situation. The problem got fixed and I have never been out of position for the Pillar of Flame since.
What does that have to do with anything? The same is expected of guild leadership. Make a minimum amount of mistakes and never make the same mistake twice. Well, I made the merger mistake once already. Guild mergers do not work. The newly formed guild always ends up as less than what it was supposed to be, if not outright failing. I have had a lot of time to step back and look at that situation, and I know how to not do it again. Guild acquisition is the way to go.
One guild acquires the raiders, guild bank, FnF members, etc. of the other guild. There is no merger, no blending of the rules and customs, no officership granted to the old GM. One guild makes the decision to disband and transfer control of everything to the other guild. This is smooth, efficient, lacking in drama and lengthy discussion, and best of all it works. Players have it made clear to them that they are not infusing their new guild with the old one, they are leaving the old one behind and joining the new.
Why is that so important? It rallies everyone under the same banner that is already in effect, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel by mashing two guild cultures together and splitting hairs over making policy for future eventualities.
Well, now. What to do with all of that info? A decision still needs to be made. What are we to do? I, for one, am going to work at being the guild that does the acquisition, not the one that gets acquired. The truth of the matter is that I like running things my way. It is smooth, it works well, I don't get complaints, and I get to filter important decisions through my years of experience instead of hoping that the 20 year old college student who has never been outside of his home town and has the life experience of a horse fly gets it right this time. The other side of that coin, though, is that I need to be able to recognize when it is time to let go and move in with the neighboring guild. Will that time come? I hope not, but if it does I will not be drowning in regret. I will be looking forward to the possibilities ahead.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Morons and Slackers
The following is a direct copy/paste from Gevlon's blog over at The Greedy Goblin. His first language is not English, so forgive the spelling and grammar errors. The content of what he has written here is what I wanted to share. I agree with him.
____________________________________________________________________________
About M&S
The morons and slackers are a central theme of this blog. I was surprised that many people still don't understand this concept and believe that I use this term simply on bad players. Some even defend them that they are just casuals, who are not even bad, just play less. This is nonsense.
The morons and slackers are indeed bad players, but not because of lack of gaming skill or effort. They are bad people whose badness is universal, applies to everything they do, including of course gaming. Let me point out the fundamental and non-gaming differences between M&S and other, less progressed players.
Any activity needs effort to be successful. You can't become an athlete, get good SAT, university diploma or keep your job unless you make appropriate effort. This applies of course to gaming. In MMOs effort correlates with time spent playing, despite it's not the same. I'm sure that over the full course of the 4.0 content I'll play more than some Paragon and Method members, without even getting close to Sinestra. "Effort" can mostly be defined as "sacrifice". I refused to sacrifice my schedule, I play when I want to. Therefore I can't be in a high-attendance guild, so no easy farmraids for me, every time I have to go with new people who takes some wipes to learn the strategy, so I spend much more time in farmbosses than the HC players, who oneshot everything with their fixed team. If I made the sacrifice of "I'll make it to raid on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday and Monday 19:00-23:00 every time", I'd kill much more bosses. Of course there is always someone who makes more effort and someone who makes less than you.
Two kind of people don't make the necessary effort to react top content: casuals and slackers. Yet their similarities end here. The casual is aware that he choose to not make the effort, therefore abandoning the goal. I'm fully aware that I won't kill Sinestra before the next content patch and gear upgrade, and I don't think I would deserve to kill her before that. The casual acknowledge the fact that there is no success without effort, he just believes that the reward isn't worth the effort. The casual is happy with his choice and doesn't envy those who have more, as he knows that they worked hard for it, and he didn't. Casuals can range from never-reach-85 funplayers exploring the world to "casual raiders" who "just" raid 3 days a week. Everyone is a casual in someone's eyes and hardcore in someone else's. "Casual" is a relative term, and it's inappropriate to use it on anyone. The proper usage is "X is more casual than Y".
The slacker also don't make the effort, but it doesn't stop him from wanting the rewards. He believes he is entitled for everything, simply on the basis of him being a human (him paying $15). He believes that others should make his rewards happen. "Others" can be Blizzard nerfing everything to his low-effort level, or other players boosting him. The slacker resent those who have more than him and believes that they are just lucky or evil who immorally keep him away from goals. He believes that the raid leader who kicks him for below-tank DPS is merely an elitist jerk who has no life and kicked him only because he has life.
The slacker is not defined by the amount of effort he makes. He is defined by the low effort/goal ratio. If you play "just" 8 hours a day and want world firsts, you are a slacker (despite much more hardcore than me). On the other hand if you play 8 hours a week and want to do one HC a week, completed the Twilight quests for 333 gear, enchanted it, you are a prepared player (more casual than me, though) who deserves his goals reached. Slacker is not a relative term, someone is or is not a slacker based on the question: does he do enough effort to reach the goals he set?
To reach success, effort is not enough. Skill is needed to make the proper choices where to make effort. If I spend 100 hours completing fluff achievements, I am much further from being ready to raid than the guy who spent 10 hours getting 346 blues. The unskilled person wastes his efforts. In WoW there are two kind of unskilled people:
The newbie don't know much about the game yet. He makes bad choices, wastes his effort. However he is aware of his ignorance and wants to learn. Reads the materials he accesses, listens to other, more skilled players and above all, learns from his mistakes. As with "casual", "newbie" is also a relative term and cannot be used on anyone. I am ignorant newbie compared to the guys who write EJ and a pro compared to those who don't know about spell rotations. Everyone is less informed and skilled (newbie) than someone and more informed and skilled (prop) to someone else.
The moron refuses to learn. His motivation can be a complete anti-knowledge culture, this case he devalues skill, believes that it doesn't exists and only effort and luck are needed. He is the "i just dun have gear" moron, who sometimes make huge effort to get gear, but still sucks as his rotation is a joke. The other possible motivation is a false belief in his knowledge. While he is ignorant, he thinks he is smart and refuses to learn from "the newbs". Both kind of morons believe that those above them made more effort (no lifers), just lucky or in worst case "got more help" (which of course means they are entitled for the same help).
"Moron" is an absolute, "you are or you are not" quality that is not based on your absolute knowledge but on "do you know enough to reach the goals you set"?. If you are healing as a shaman in a world first aspirant guild and don't know if 1.2 mastery rating or 1 crit rating is better for a you in avearge 364, and you don't even know that you should, you are a moron. On the other hand if you only know that both stats are good for a resto shaman, while hit is not, you are completely skilled for someone who does only Argoloth and 5-mans.
As you can see, the difference between casual and slacker, newbie and moron has nothing to do with spell rotations, boss tactics or ilvl. These are personality, value, meta-skill differences. While newbieness and casualness is limited to a game, being slacker and moron are universally true to the person.
Last question: why "M&S", why do I address them together, despite moron and slacker are pretty different in motivation, beliefs and values? Because unless I spend lot of time analyzing a specimen, I can't tell which one is him. Is he ungemmed because he doesn't know the importance of gems or because he doesn't want to grind gold for gems? Does he fails the boss mechanics because he don't know about written boss strategies or because he can't be arsed to read them? Does he beg gold because he doesn't know about goldmaking techniques or because he is lazy to do them? Does he stands in the fire because he don't know that the incoming damage is avoidable or because he is watching TV? Does he write "yo m8 cud u link mats 4 vial" because he really think it's English (and doesn't know that Wowhead has the recipe) or because he can't care less to write properly (and use wowhead)?
I'm not his therapist. It's not my job to solve his problems. If he aims for a goal, he must do the necessary effort and have the necessary skill to reach this goal. If he can't do it, he is either a moron or a slacker. A bad person who wastes the time of 4-9-24 other human beings. The title is about his skill/goal, effort/goal ratio. Since the only way to get something without proper skill and effort is boosting, the M&S is necessarily a leech, a parasite on the smart and the hard-working.
One more question remained: how could someone leave his current state and progress higher without turning into an M&S? I mean if you do the effort and have the skill for X goal, and it is inadequate to reach Y, at the moment you set Y as a goal, you become an M&S by the above statements. The answer is humility and openness. You should be aware and make every participants aware that you are not yet there to reach the goal. You must learn and accept criticism from those who are already there, seek knowledge and balance the lack of skill with extra effort.
The morons and slackers are indeed bad players, but not because of lack of gaming skill or effort. They are bad people whose badness is universal, applies to everything they do, including of course gaming. Let me point out the fundamental and non-gaming differences between M&S and other, less progressed players.
Any activity needs effort to be successful. You can't become an athlete, get good SAT, university diploma or keep your job unless you make appropriate effort. This applies of course to gaming. In MMOs effort correlates with time spent playing, despite it's not the same. I'm sure that over the full course of the 4.0 content I'll play more than some Paragon and Method members, without even getting close to Sinestra. "Effort" can mostly be defined as "sacrifice". I refused to sacrifice my schedule, I play when I want to. Therefore I can't be in a high-attendance guild, so no easy farmraids for me, every time I have to go with new people who takes some wipes to learn the strategy, so I spend much more time in farmbosses than the HC players, who oneshot everything with their fixed team. If I made the sacrifice of "I'll make it to raid on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday and Monday 19:00-23:00 every time", I'd kill much more bosses. Of course there is always someone who makes more effort and someone who makes less than you.
Two kind of people don't make the necessary effort to react top content: casuals and slackers. Yet their similarities end here. The casual is aware that he choose to not make the effort, therefore abandoning the goal. I'm fully aware that I won't kill Sinestra before the next content patch and gear upgrade, and I don't think I would deserve to kill her before that. The casual acknowledge the fact that there is no success without effort, he just believes that the reward isn't worth the effort. The casual is happy with his choice and doesn't envy those who have more, as he knows that they worked hard for it, and he didn't. Casuals can range from never-reach-85 funplayers exploring the world to "casual raiders" who "just" raid 3 days a week. Everyone is a casual in someone's eyes and hardcore in someone else's. "Casual" is a relative term, and it's inappropriate to use it on anyone. The proper usage is "X is more casual than Y".
The slacker also don't make the effort, but it doesn't stop him from wanting the rewards. He believes he is entitled for everything, simply on the basis of him being a human (him paying $15). He believes that others should make his rewards happen. "Others" can be Blizzard nerfing everything to his low-effort level, or other players boosting him. The slacker resent those who have more than him and believes that they are just lucky or evil who immorally keep him away from goals. He believes that the raid leader who kicks him for below-tank DPS is merely an elitist jerk who has no life and kicked him only because he has life.
The slacker is not defined by the amount of effort he makes. He is defined by the low effort/goal ratio. If you play "just" 8 hours a day and want world firsts, you are a slacker (despite much more hardcore than me). On the other hand if you play 8 hours a week and want to do one HC a week, completed the Twilight quests for 333 gear, enchanted it, you are a prepared player (more casual than me, though) who deserves his goals reached. Slacker is not a relative term, someone is or is not a slacker based on the question: does he do enough effort to reach the goals he set?
To reach success, effort is not enough. Skill is needed to make the proper choices where to make effort. If I spend 100 hours completing fluff achievements, I am much further from being ready to raid than the guy who spent 10 hours getting 346 blues. The unskilled person wastes his efforts. In WoW there are two kind of unskilled people:
The newbie don't know much about the game yet. He makes bad choices, wastes his effort. However he is aware of his ignorance and wants to learn. Reads the materials he accesses, listens to other, more skilled players and above all, learns from his mistakes. As with "casual", "newbie" is also a relative term and cannot be used on anyone. I am ignorant newbie compared to the guys who write EJ and a pro compared to those who don't know about spell rotations. Everyone is less informed and skilled (newbie) than someone and more informed and skilled (prop) to someone else.
The moron refuses to learn. His motivation can be a complete anti-knowledge culture, this case he devalues skill, believes that it doesn't exists and only effort and luck are needed. He is the "i just dun have gear" moron, who sometimes make huge effort to get gear, but still sucks as his rotation is a joke. The other possible motivation is a false belief in his knowledge. While he is ignorant, he thinks he is smart and refuses to learn from "the newbs". Both kind of morons believe that those above them made more effort (no lifers), just lucky or in worst case "got more help" (which of course means they are entitled for the same help).
"Moron" is an absolute, "you are or you are not" quality that is not based on your absolute knowledge but on "do you know enough to reach the goals you set"?. If you are healing as a shaman in a world first aspirant guild and don't know if 1.2 mastery rating or 1 crit rating is better for a you in avearge 364, and you don't even know that you should, you are a moron. On the other hand if you only know that both stats are good for a resto shaman, while hit is not, you are completely skilled for someone who does only Argoloth and 5-mans.
As you can see, the difference between casual and slacker, newbie and moron has nothing to do with spell rotations, boss tactics or ilvl. These are personality, value, meta-skill differences. While newbieness and casualness is limited to a game, being slacker and moron are universally true to the person.
Last question: why "M&S", why do I address them together, despite moron and slacker are pretty different in motivation, beliefs and values? Because unless I spend lot of time analyzing a specimen, I can't tell which one is him. Is he ungemmed because he doesn't know the importance of gems or because he doesn't want to grind gold for gems? Does he fails the boss mechanics because he don't know about written boss strategies or because he can't be arsed to read them? Does he beg gold because he doesn't know about goldmaking techniques or because he is lazy to do them? Does he stands in the fire because he don't know that the incoming damage is avoidable or because he is watching TV? Does he write "yo m8 cud u link mats 4 vial" because he really think it's English (and doesn't know that Wowhead has the recipe) or because he can't care less to write properly (and use wowhead)?
I'm not his therapist. It's not my job to solve his problems. If he aims for a goal, he must do the necessary effort and have the necessary skill to reach this goal. If he can't do it, he is either a moron or a slacker. A bad person who wastes the time of 4-9-24 other human beings. The title is about his skill/goal, effort/goal ratio. Since the only way to get something without proper skill and effort is boosting, the M&S is necessarily a leech, a parasite on the smart and the hard-working.
One more question remained: how could someone leave his current state and progress higher without turning into an M&S? I mean if you do the effort and have the skill for X goal, and it is inadequate to reach Y, at the moment you set Y as a goal, you become an M&S by the above statements. The answer is humility and openness. You should be aware and make every participants aware that you are not yet there to reach the goal. You must learn and accept criticism from those who are already there, seek knowledge and balance the lack of skill with extra effort.
Friday, January 21, 2011
What the Varsity Players Have Learned
So yesterday I promised that I would provide some insight into why 'varsity' players seem to be so much more on the ball. A lot of it has to do with their mindset. I can't give you tips for that. It is what it is. If you do not have the drive to succeed through self improvement then you aren't going to make it. I cannot give you that drive, that passion, you need to decide you want it bad enough. As far as practical changes that you can make to your play, I have a few.
The first and most important is your UI. Your UI is how you directly interface with the game. If it is not set up well then you are setting yourself up for failure. Are you a healer that has your raid frames off to the side or down in a corner? How can you expect to keep your eyes on the action and still play whack-a-mole with the health bars with a UI like that? Those are the healers who keep dying to the environment because their eyes were nowhere near the action and they didn't see that giant wall of fire coming towards them. Do you need to dispell or decurse on certain fights? If so is your UI set up for it? I can't tell you how many times I have wiped because the mage was the only decurse we had in the raid and they had never set up their UI for it. Spare yourself the embarrassment, especially if you are a healer, and instead look like a pro! Have CD's to watch (who doesn't)? Then why would you ever have a UI without that info easily displayed. One of the ways I can consistently squeak out more DPS than the competition is that I can easily track my CD's. If I get 10 more seconds with a CD running than you did, and all because I was able to watch it and pop it 10 seconds earlier... you get the idea.
There are many more examples I could give, but the general concept boils down to this. Make a list of the important things that you need to do and keep track of; then take a good, hard look at your UI. Is it set up for success? Notice that I did not ask if it looks smooth and cool; nor did I ask if you are comfortable with it. If it is not set up for success then you are pulling the rug out from under yourself.
The next is key bindings. I wrote a simple how-to guide some time ago and you can find it here. Let me reiterate what I say in the guide. If you are a clicker you are failing. I don't need to look at my bars, find my interrupt button, get my mouse over to it, and click all in the space of a 1 second cast. My fingers just know which button the interrupt is, and press it when I see a spell start casting. On my UI the action bars aren't even displayed front and center, because I don't need to see them.
Another tip would be your general knowledge. I have seen and heard every stupid mistake you can think of due to not knowing your shit. Back in TBC when WF totem put a 10 second weapon buff on you and refreshed it every 3 seconds did a warrior ask for someone to give him another WF buff because his was wearing off? Yes, he did. I have seen countless melee attack from the front and then wonder why their DPS suffers and the tank takes a pounding like he is wearing cloth. I have wiped because people don't understand basic game and class mechanics, like how taunt really works or how being just 1 point below the required level of resist makes you still vulnerable to those spells. The truth of the matter is that G.I. Joe had it right. Knowing is half the battle, and the more you know the more battles you will be prepared to win. If you really want to shine like a superstar then you need to know what you are doing.
Are there other tips and little methods that separate the decent players from the truly great players? Absolutely, but these three are by far the most important. If you are reading this and saying to yourself that you are fine, you don't need to make these improvements, then you are one of the players that will always be stuck just below the bar of excellence. Get over it and make yourself better.
The first and most important is your UI. Your UI is how you directly interface with the game. If it is not set up well then you are setting yourself up for failure. Are you a healer that has your raid frames off to the side or down in a corner? How can you expect to keep your eyes on the action and still play whack-a-mole with the health bars with a UI like that? Those are the healers who keep dying to the environment because their eyes were nowhere near the action and they didn't see that giant wall of fire coming towards them. Do you need to dispell or decurse on certain fights? If so is your UI set up for it? I can't tell you how many times I have wiped because the mage was the only decurse we had in the raid and they had never set up their UI for it. Spare yourself the embarrassment, especially if you are a healer, and instead look like a pro! Have CD's to watch (who doesn't)? Then why would you ever have a UI without that info easily displayed. One of the ways I can consistently squeak out more DPS than the competition is that I can easily track my CD's. If I get 10 more seconds with a CD running than you did, and all because I was able to watch it and pop it 10 seconds earlier... you get the idea.
There are many more examples I could give, but the general concept boils down to this. Make a list of the important things that you need to do and keep track of; then take a good, hard look at your UI. Is it set up for success? Notice that I did not ask if it looks smooth and cool; nor did I ask if you are comfortable with it. If it is not set up for success then you are pulling the rug out from under yourself.
The next is key bindings. I wrote a simple how-to guide some time ago and you can find it here. Let me reiterate what I say in the guide. If you are a clicker you are failing. I don't need to look at my bars, find my interrupt button, get my mouse over to it, and click all in the space of a 1 second cast. My fingers just know which button the interrupt is, and press it when I see a spell start casting. On my UI the action bars aren't even displayed front and center, because I don't need to see them.
Another tip would be your general knowledge. I have seen and heard every stupid mistake you can think of due to not knowing your shit. Back in TBC when WF totem put a 10 second weapon buff on you and refreshed it every 3 seconds did a warrior ask for someone to give him another WF buff because his was wearing off? Yes, he did. I have seen countless melee attack from the front and then wonder why their DPS suffers and the tank takes a pounding like he is wearing cloth. I have wiped because people don't understand basic game and class mechanics, like how taunt really works or how being just 1 point below the required level of resist makes you still vulnerable to those spells. The truth of the matter is that G.I. Joe had it right. Knowing is half the battle, and the more you know the more battles you will be prepared to win. If you really want to shine like a superstar then you need to know what you are doing.
Are there other tips and little methods that separate the decent players from the truly great players? Absolutely, but these three are by far the most important. If you are reading this and saying to yourself that you are fine, you don't need to make these improvements, then you are one of the players that will always be stuck just below the bar of excellence. Get over it and make yourself better.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Elitism vs. Having Standards
I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. Lets call him Tim. Tim is a very strong player and I have no doubt that he would do well in any US first or world first guild. No exaggeration, he is that level of player; but he has been tossing around in the minor leagues for some time now, enjoying limited success.
Why does Tim settle? Because of the time commitment. Until recently he has been able to enjoy an amount of success and raid progression that is not the best, but is acceptable given the amount of time he has to put in to it. Were there baddies in Tim's raid? Sure. Did his back get sore from carrying them? Regularly. Did he keep pushing because it was the best he could do on two nights a week? Exactly that... until recently.
With the release of Cata all of Tim's baddies got worse. Or, more accurately, their badness was put in the limelight. He is now starting to go through the same frustration that I went through in WotLK. Carrying people is no longer acceptable to him. It is too much work for too little gain, especially when the people he is trying to help and carry along are dragging their feet the whole way.
It is like they don't mean what they say. They say they want to raid and be good at it, but then they don't do what needs to be done in order to make that a reality. Instead they always have an excuse for why the failure wasn't their fault.
"I couldn't see the fire. How can I be expected to move if I can't see it?"
"I guess I just need more gear for this content. I need epics in order to run the content that gives me epics."
"Lag killed me. Every time we do this boss. Every week. On the same void zone. Man lag sucks."
So what did Tim do to combat this growing incompetence? He set standards. Let me say that his guild has always had standards, they were just loosely understood and never expressly stated. Now they have a benchmark. A bar that the raiders must rise above in order to raid... and it is pissing everyone off. All of the lazy, incompetent people who were enjoying being carried through content are having that taken away from them, and they don't like it.
The baddies in Tim's guild have started throwing around the term 'elitist', directed at Tim and others of a like mind in his guild. They are claiming that Tim expects too much, that he sets the bar too high, and that his refusal to allow people to play below the bar is just elitism of the worst kind. They want Tim to structure the guild for the lowest common denominator.
I say Tim is making the right choice. Good job to Tim! There is a very big difference between elitism and having standards. Let me use high school football as an example. In high school you have tryouts for the football team. The experts (coaches) observe the kids that are trying to make the team and gauge their skill level. Then they place the kids on different teams according to their performance. The best players get to be on the varsity team. The next level down is junior varsity, and below that is the "just for funzies", or recreational team. The people on the junior varsity team are less skilled and/or less experienced than those on the varsity team. They just can't compete at the varsity level, and the coaches recognize that. Are the coaches being elitist assholes? Are they being mean spirited and saying, "sorry kid, you can't belong to our club"? Absolutely not. They have set standards and the kids on the junior varsity team did not meet those standards. In the future, as the junior varsity players improve and sharpen their skills they will have more opportunities to move up to the varsity team. When they do move up they are welcomed excitedly as part of the team. No one is shutting them down and saying "you are not elite enough to join us. Just go away." They simply have standards. The varsity team is designed to perform at a certain level and if you cannot keep up then you do not belong on the varsity team. Maybe later, when you have gotten better, but not at this time.
In WoW, a lot of people refuse to see things this way. They think that being told they are not 'varsity' quality is an insult and that makes the people telling them 'elitist assholes'. In reality, people like Tim and myself do not want to see these players fail. We do not want to see them be bad. We don't expressly enjoy kicking them off of the team. We want to see them succeed, learn, grow, become better players, and be a valuable member of the team. Great players are hard to find. If you can become one, we want you! Here is the kicker, we aren't going to do it for you. My raid group is not "How to raid 101". My raid group is for people that are already good. I have standards, and to raid with me you have to meet or exceed them. Tim is finding out that he wants the same thing, and that most of the players in his guild just don't get it.
______________________________________________________________________________________
P.S. Tomorrow I will write about some practical ways to help yourself make the 'varsity team'. If you are struggling with getting better at the game there are most likely some very simple things that you can do to fix yourself that may not have occurred to you, and they don't require as much time as you might think.
Why does Tim settle? Because of the time commitment. Until recently he has been able to enjoy an amount of success and raid progression that is not the best, but is acceptable given the amount of time he has to put in to it. Were there baddies in Tim's raid? Sure. Did his back get sore from carrying them? Regularly. Did he keep pushing because it was the best he could do on two nights a week? Exactly that... until recently.
With the release of Cata all of Tim's baddies got worse. Or, more accurately, their badness was put in the limelight. He is now starting to go through the same frustration that I went through in WotLK. Carrying people is no longer acceptable to him. It is too much work for too little gain, especially when the people he is trying to help and carry along are dragging their feet the whole way.
It is like they don't mean what they say. They say they want to raid and be good at it, but then they don't do what needs to be done in order to make that a reality. Instead they always have an excuse for why the failure wasn't their fault.
"I couldn't see the fire. How can I be expected to move if I can't see it?"
"I guess I just need more gear for this content. I need epics in order to run the content that gives me epics."
"Lag killed me. Every time we do this boss. Every week. On the same void zone. Man lag sucks."
So what did Tim do to combat this growing incompetence? He set standards. Let me say that his guild has always had standards, they were just loosely understood and never expressly stated. Now they have a benchmark. A bar that the raiders must rise above in order to raid... and it is pissing everyone off. All of the lazy, incompetent people who were enjoying being carried through content are having that taken away from them, and they don't like it.
The baddies in Tim's guild have started throwing around the term 'elitist', directed at Tim and others of a like mind in his guild. They are claiming that Tim expects too much, that he sets the bar too high, and that his refusal to allow people to play below the bar is just elitism of the worst kind. They want Tim to structure the guild for the lowest common denominator.
I say Tim is making the right choice. Good job to Tim! There is a very big difference between elitism and having standards. Let me use high school football as an example. In high school you have tryouts for the football team. The experts (coaches) observe the kids that are trying to make the team and gauge their skill level. Then they place the kids on different teams according to their performance. The best players get to be on the varsity team. The next level down is junior varsity, and below that is the "just for funzies", or recreational team. The people on the junior varsity team are less skilled and/or less experienced than those on the varsity team. They just can't compete at the varsity level, and the coaches recognize that. Are the coaches being elitist assholes? Are they being mean spirited and saying, "sorry kid, you can't belong to our club"? Absolutely not. They have set standards and the kids on the junior varsity team did not meet those standards. In the future, as the junior varsity players improve and sharpen their skills they will have more opportunities to move up to the varsity team. When they do move up they are welcomed excitedly as part of the team. No one is shutting them down and saying "you are not elite enough to join us. Just go away." They simply have standards. The varsity team is designed to perform at a certain level and if you cannot keep up then you do not belong on the varsity team. Maybe later, when you have gotten better, but not at this time.
In WoW, a lot of people refuse to see things this way. They think that being told they are not 'varsity' quality is an insult and that makes the people telling them 'elitist assholes'. In reality, people like Tim and myself do not want to see these players fail. We do not want to see them be bad. We don't expressly enjoy kicking them off of the team. We want to see them succeed, learn, grow, become better players, and be a valuable member of the team. Great players are hard to find. If you can become one, we want you! Here is the kicker, we aren't going to do it for you. My raid group is not "How to raid 101". My raid group is for people that are already good. I have standards, and to raid with me you have to meet or exceed them. Tim is finding out that he wants the same thing, and that most of the players in his guild just don't get it.
______________________________________________________________________________________
P.S. Tomorrow I will write about some practical ways to help yourself make the 'varsity team'. If you are struggling with getting better at the game there are most likely some very simple things that you can do to fix yourself that may not have occurred to you, and they don't require as much time as you might think.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
I Was Never Unlucky
So a very good friend of mine (lets call him Bob) recently tried to make it into a raid group. He was passed over for another player of the same class and spec. Why? Because this other player was able to demonstrate the same ability to not stand in fire, interrupt enemy MOBs (yes it is capitalized, because it is an acronym for Mobile Object Byte, not a word that brings to mind peasants with torches and pitchforks), perform the gimmick of a strat, and consistently pulled an average of 2k more DPS than Bob. From a guild master and raid leader standpoint, the choice is clear. If you ask Bob... he claims he was unlucky.
I have never been unlucky in WoW. I have fallen victim to the RNG just like everyone else, but I have never been unlucky in the way that Bob is claiming here. I asked Bob what he meant by "unlucky". He said that the other player has more gear (I will write a post on that later; it is a whole other can of worms). I asked Bob how that makes him unlucky. He claimed that he has been trying to get gear like everyone else and it just hasn't dropped.
Let me spare you the play-by-play of our conversation and just tell you the results. Bob did not run a heroic every day, let alone more than one. He only ran about three heroics a week. He did not purchase any justice point gear. He did not PvP for honor gear to fill in the gaps. He did not craft gear or purchase crafted gear. He did not buy any reputation gear. He did not even run regular dungeons at all once he had the item level for heroics.
What did Bob do, then? He ran the bare minimum of normal dungeons to get the gear for heroics. He ran about six heroics over the course of two weeks. He spent plenty of time on an alt. He complained that he was unlucky with gear drops.
What did Bob's competitor do? He ran multiple heroics every day. He purchased both justice point and honor point gear to fill in the gaps where he didn't get something to drop. He gained the rep necessary to buy epics and the bought them. In short, he worked for it. Did Bob's competition get every single piece of gear he wanted? No. The RNG decided to not drop that gear for him. Did he have much, much better gear than Bob? You bet your panties he did.
Luck is not a big factor in WoW. Yes the RNG exists. Yes it has an effect on your play. When you look at the big picture, though, you are not lucky or unlucky.... you are skilled or unskilled, hard working or a slacker. If you are one of those people that always has an excuse for why it isn't your fault, then you do not have what it takes to compete at the highest levels.
The attitude of a winner is to adapt and overcome. No gear? Figure out how to get some and do it. Keep getting killed by the fire? Figure out how to not get killed by the fire and do it. Can't keep your DPS high enough? Figure out how to DPS properly and do it. There is always a solution, and hint: it has something to do with you... not Lady Luck.
I have never been unlucky in WoW. I have fallen victim to the RNG just like everyone else, but I have never been unlucky in the way that Bob is claiming here. I asked Bob what he meant by "unlucky". He said that the other player has more gear (I will write a post on that later; it is a whole other can of worms). I asked Bob how that makes him unlucky. He claimed that he has been trying to get gear like everyone else and it just hasn't dropped.
Let me spare you the play-by-play of our conversation and just tell you the results. Bob did not run a heroic every day, let alone more than one. He only ran about three heroics a week. He did not purchase any justice point gear. He did not PvP for honor gear to fill in the gaps. He did not craft gear or purchase crafted gear. He did not buy any reputation gear. He did not even run regular dungeons at all once he had the item level for heroics.
What did Bob do, then? He ran the bare minimum of normal dungeons to get the gear for heroics. He ran about six heroics over the course of two weeks. He spent plenty of time on an alt. He complained that he was unlucky with gear drops.
What did Bob's competitor do? He ran multiple heroics every day. He purchased both justice point and honor point gear to fill in the gaps where he didn't get something to drop. He gained the rep necessary to buy epics and the bought them. In short, he worked for it. Did Bob's competition get every single piece of gear he wanted? No. The RNG decided to not drop that gear for him. Did he have much, much better gear than Bob? You bet your panties he did.
Luck is not a big factor in WoW. Yes the RNG exists. Yes it has an effect on your play. When you look at the big picture, though, you are not lucky or unlucky.... you are skilled or unskilled, hard working or a slacker. If you are one of those people that always has an excuse for why it isn't your fault, then you do not have what it takes to compete at the highest levels.
The attitude of a winner is to adapt and overcome. No gear? Figure out how to get some and do it. Keep getting killed by the fire? Figure out how to not get killed by the fire and do it. Can't keep your DPS high enough? Figure out how to DPS properly and do it. There is always a solution, and hint: it has something to do with you... not Lady Luck.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Where I am coming from. Part 1
For my first ever blog post I have decided to give a general overview of my WoW resume and maybe some other thoughts. Why is that relevant? So you can know where I am coming from and what experiences I have had that influence my thinking, understanding, and grasp of the big picture. It will undoubtedly be longer than what will turn out to be an average post from me, as I have six years of personal history to get through. With that in mind, here goes.
Edit: I will be breaking this up into three posts. It was really long and I would rather not lose people due to the intimidation factor when faced will a "wall of text".
The Beginning
I started playing WoW in 2004, near the beginning of vanilla. It took me two months to level my first character (a priest that I leveled as shadow and specced holy at 60) to 60. When I was level 47 the AQ gates were opened on my server. That should give you a good idea of how long I have been playing.
After hitting level 60 I spent all of my time running instances. One day in Scholo I was healing for someone's guild run and they decided that they liked what they saw. An unguilded holy priest that didn't suck. I got invited to join their guild, and after asking a few questions about where they were in raid progression I decided to join Dragons of the Moon on the Gul'dan server, alliance side.
After joining I found out that they weren't quite as ready to raid as they claimed. I was told, yes we will be raiding. We are about two weeks away from our first ZG raid. A month later still no raiding. I pressed the guild leadership for it and about a month and a half after joining, off to ZG we went. Only one of the members had ever been to a raid before, so he volunteered to be the raid leader. It was horrible, but no one noticed. We were all feeling that weird mix of nerves and excitement as we tried to figure everything out. We ended up killing High Priest Venoxis (the snake boss) and wiping a lot on trash. Afterwords, when we were all talking about how it went, we agreed that the raid leader was bad at leading raids and someone needed to research how to do this raiding thing so that they could provide some good direction to the guild. I volunteered, and the spark of a raider's heart began in me.
I devoured all information I could find on the subject. I learned boss strats from other players, class mechanics from the forums, useful mods, anything I could to be successful. Now, you need to realize that at this time there wasn't much out there. Wowhead did not exist, wowwiki was a small site that didn't offer much, no elitistjerks, no bosskillers, no stratfu, no tankspot, no strat videos being made by anyone. Mods consisted of CTRA and Perl Classic. What was available was much more valuable than any of that, though.
Detailed explanations of class and game mechanics were available on the official forums. Tables where you could see each class's regen rate from spirit, full explanations of the five second rule and why it was important, Ciderhelm's original version of Fortifications: a Warrior's Reference Guide to Tanking, lists of every mob in the game that had a usable ability when you MC'd them, and much much more. These days when you want to find out how to kill a boss you can just watch a strat video. Back then you had to understand how the game mechanics worked and use that understanding to figure things out. Because of that, individual guilds would often have wildly varying strats for how they killed a boss. Thus it was left to me to come up with our strats. I loved it.
We cleared ZG many times as a guild and actually killed vanilla Onyxia quite a few times with only 30 people. Other than that we failed at raiding. We never had enough people to get into 40 mans, and AQ20 we could never push past the third boss. I raided MC with another guild (and earned my Benediction/Anathema), but personally never got into BWL, AQ40, or Vanilla Naxx.
When TBC came around I decided things would be different. I was going to form a real raid group from my guild (of which I was now the healing officer) and we were going to be successful. I was one of the first five people on the server to step inside of Karazhan, a mere 4 days after TBC launched.
Pre-nerf Karazhan was hard. 360° cleaves one shot melee DPS, AoE damage was high when we didn't have tools to deal with it well, instant random aggro drops got healers (meaning me) killed, and everyone felt way too squishy. Combine this with the fact that knowledge of things like the hit cap were not yet wide spread, 25+ people all wanting to get into a 10 man raid, and people changing mains to the extent that we lost tanks and healers... and what you get is a guild on the brink of falling apart. Which is exactly what it did over the course of a few months.
Edit: I will be breaking this up into three posts. It was really long and I would rather not lose people due to the intimidation factor when faced will a "wall of text".
The Beginning
I started playing WoW in 2004, near the beginning of vanilla. It took me two months to level my first character (a priest that I leveled as shadow and specced holy at 60) to 60. When I was level 47 the AQ gates were opened on my server. That should give you a good idea of how long I have been playing.
After hitting level 60 I spent all of my time running instances. One day in Scholo I was healing for someone's guild run and they decided that they liked what they saw. An unguilded holy priest that didn't suck. I got invited to join their guild, and after asking a few questions about where they were in raid progression I decided to join Dragons of the Moon on the Gul'dan server, alliance side.
After joining I found out that they weren't quite as ready to raid as they claimed. I was told, yes we will be raiding. We are about two weeks away from our first ZG raid. A month later still no raiding. I pressed the guild leadership for it and about a month and a half after joining, off to ZG we went. Only one of the members had ever been to a raid before, so he volunteered to be the raid leader. It was horrible, but no one noticed. We were all feeling that weird mix of nerves and excitement as we tried to figure everything out. We ended up killing High Priest Venoxis (the snake boss) and wiping a lot on trash. Afterwords, when we were all talking about how it went, we agreed that the raid leader was bad at leading raids and someone needed to research how to do this raiding thing so that they could provide some good direction to the guild. I volunteered, and the spark of a raider's heart began in me.
I devoured all information I could find on the subject. I learned boss strats from other players, class mechanics from the forums, useful mods, anything I could to be successful. Now, you need to realize that at this time there wasn't much out there. Wowhead did not exist, wowwiki was a small site that didn't offer much, no elitistjerks, no bosskillers, no stratfu, no tankspot, no strat videos being made by anyone. Mods consisted of CTRA and Perl Classic. What was available was much more valuable than any of that, though.
Detailed explanations of class and game mechanics were available on the official forums. Tables where you could see each class's regen rate from spirit, full explanations of the five second rule and why it was important, Ciderhelm's original version of Fortifications: a Warrior's Reference Guide to Tanking, lists of every mob in the game that had a usable ability when you MC'd them, and much much more. These days when you want to find out how to kill a boss you can just watch a strat video. Back then you had to understand how the game mechanics worked and use that understanding to figure things out. Because of that, individual guilds would often have wildly varying strats for how they killed a boss. Thus it was left to me to come up with our strats. I loved it.
We cleared ZG many times as a guild and actually killed vanilla Onyxia quite a few times with only 30 people. Other than that we failed at raiding. We never had enough people to get into 40 mans, and AQ20 we could never push past the third boss. I raided MC with another guild (and earned my Benediction/Anathema), but personally never got into BWL, AQ40, or Vanilla Naxx.
 | |
| Yep, I was in there with rez sickness. At that time it didn't reduce healing done, only damage. |
When TBC came around I decided things would be different. I was going to form a real raid group from my guild (of which I was now the healing officer) and we were going to be successful. I was one of the first five people on the server to step inside of Karazhan, a mere 4 days after TBC launched.
 |
| Hint: I'm the floating priest. |
Pre-nerf Karazhan was hard. 360° cleaves one shot melee DPS, AoE damage was high when we didn't have tools to deal with it well, instant random aggro drops got healers (meaning me) killed, and everyone felt way too squishy. Combine this with the fact that knowledge of things like the hit cap were not yet wide spread, 25+ people all wanting to get into a 10 man raid, and people changing mains to the extent that we lost tanks and healers... and what you get is a guild on the brink of falling apart. Which is exactly what it did over the course of a few months.
Where I am coming from. Part 2
My Growing Disdain for Casual Players Trying to Fake the Funk
During this time the elitistjerks website started to become what it is today, people were theorycrafting, testing mechanics, sharing their data, etc. Wowhead became widely known and used, wowwiki was getting bigger, mods were being written faster than anyone expected and you could find a mod for literally anything. Wowinsider and mmo-champion came into being, and I was devouring information. Since no one in my guild was doing their own research, I did it all. They quickly figured out that they could just ask me for the info instead of looking it up on their own and I let it happen.
When my guild fell apart I started looking around for a new guild. In the mean time I was raiding and clearing Kara, Gruul, and Mag with a friend's guild. I found what I hoped would be my new raiding home on the Vek'nilash server. So I server transferred and joined them as an applicant. Long story short, I failed. Back on Gul'dan I was the best healer in the guild. I always out-healed everyone else by large margins and never ran OOM. On Vek'nilash I was usually dead last, I died a lot during my applicant raids, and to top it all off I walked in with all of my knowledge about game and class mechanics thinking I could impress them with it. It didn't impress them, it made me look like a know-it-all prick. So they politely declined my application.
At that time there was a three month cooldown on server transferring, so my priest was stuck there. Meanwhile my friends back on Gul'dan had reformed and needed a MT, a raid leader, and a generally knowledgeable person. So I finished leveling my 57 warrior alt, and became those things for them. In light of my failures on Vek'nilash I was determined to become better. I became the stereotypical raid-nazi MT that people joke about. We progressed through Kara, Mag, and Gruul from a fresh start; but everything was not alright. Half of the raiders were not committed, refused to learn about their class and improve, and generally just wanted a free ride. Since Gul'dan was an extremely low population server, we didn't have a pool of players to recruit from. So myself and the core of the raid group all transferred to Dalaran.
While trying to recruit to fill our ranks on Dalaran we met with another guild in a similar situation and ended up merging with them. We became Twilight Ascension. The guild that we merged with had never been into SSC or TK, and out of my guild only I had experience in those two raids (from my applicant period on Vek'nilash). So off we went, pushing into SSC and TK. We made regular progress at decent speeds. This was helped by the fact that I already knew what to do and was able to easily direct things in my raid-nazi MT role. Then we hit Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider.
We worked on Vashj alone for a month. We occasionally made it to phase three, but it was seldom enough that we knew it was luck, and not skill that was getting us there. During this process the glaring weaknesses in my raid group became clear. More than half of my raiders weren't cutting the mustard. I tried to recruit to replace them but it wasn't going well. People didn't want to join a guild stuck at Vashj, and I couldn't blame them. This situation was complicated by the removal of attunements to BT and MH.
That patch happened when we were on our fourth week of Vashj wipes. Suddenly my raiders no longer cared about the kill. They lost their hunger for the progression. They simply wanted to move on the easy way, and I lost my faith in them completely. We moved into BT and MH at the prodding of my officer council and started wiping in there instead of on Vashj. The "easy 3" (as the first three bosses in both BT and MH were called) were not that easy for my guild. This is because my raiders were unmotivated, unskilled, and didn't care to improve. They wanted relaxed and easy raiding. Replacing them was severely hindered by guild policy and a poor choice of recruitment officer. Why couldn't I change that? Due to the merger I was actually a co-GM, and the officer council had more weight to throw around than either myself or my co-GM. In short, it was a poorly set up guild command structure, and I learned to never try that again.
Eventually I decided that not having my Vashj and Kael kills needed to be fixed. So I grabbed the best of my raiders and PuG'd the other half of the raid. We killed Lady Vashj in 4 attempts in about 1 hour and 30 minutes. That experience put the final nail in the coffin for Twilight Ascension. I was not going to keep putting so much time and effort into a guild that was out-performed by a PuG. As luck would have it, some of the PuG players in that raid were from a decent guild that very recently became in need of players, including a MT.
Over the course of the next few weeks I staged an exodus. I took the 12 best players I had and left Twilight Ascension. About a week before it happened someone let the cat out of the bag and drama ensued. The Reader's Digest version of the story is that we left the guild, got our invites to Heroes of the Command, and Twilight Ascension fell apart completely over the next month.
Heroes of the Command impressed me. They were fast, the raiders were on the ball, the strats executed well, exactly what I had tried to coax out of my old guild, and they did it without a raid-nazi leading them. They were in need of so many raiders due to real life circumstances. We were able to keep the guild's raid group in business and they gave us a much needed home. We joined them when they were up to 8/9 BT and 5/5 MH. I became the MT and as a guild we worked for, and achieved, our Illidan progression kill.We also earned our Amani Warbears and started our way into Sunwell. Unfortunately, that is where HotC stopped being a raiding guild.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Where I am coming from. Part 3
With the release of WotLK I became a retribution paladin. I had leveled one during TBC to use as a PvP alt specifically because, at that point in time, ret was the laughing stock of all specs and I was determined to become good at it anyway. In WotLK, that obviously changed. HotC started raiding two weeks into WotLK and had a rough start of it. People that were the core of the raid team before were now displaying extreme amounts of apathy and disinterest. Performance was low everywhere, and my frustration started running high. Then after several conversations on ventrilo with the whole raid group, it was decided that we weren't going to push our raiding forward as a guild. We would raid, but not place any emphasis on min/maxing, achievements, hard modes, or even trying to correct failing raid members for the betterment of the team. Several influential people felt that all of those things created a hostile environment that they didn't want to be a part of... but they still wanted to raid. So the guild slowly declined into casual-ness. As it did so I ramped up in being an asshole.
Fast forward to ICC, when the 5% buff had just gone active. HotC was still trying to kill Professor Putricide; I had gotten every 10 man achievement you can think of, including all achievement mounts, Algalon killed, and ToC completed on heroic with 50 attempts left because I formed my own group that I ran my own way. In the HotC 25 mans I had blown up on vent with outbursts of frustration and telling people off so many times that I only had two actual friends left in the guild. During a late night conversation one of the officers asked me what it was that I liked about HotC. The answer? From where I sat there was not very much to like. So I gquit, faction changed to horde, server transferred to Firetree, and joined Relax.
When I joined Relax we were #32 in the US. While I was there we went from being #32 to being #24. This was the hardcore raiding that I had wanted since I first stepped into ZG. This was a group of people whose motto was "Rule #76: No excuses. Play like a champion." (Yes, that was our motto. Yes, they stole it from Wedding Crashers). We completed every hard mode, every achievement, earned mounts in both 10 man and 25, and raided hard modes with alt groups. The people there were all self motivated, success driven, and goal oriented. They didn't require prodding to min/max, that was the expected norm. You never had someone show up to a new fight that hadn't gone over several strats and videos with a fine-toothed comb. They were in it to win it, and it showed... and with them I proved that the heart of a hardcore raider within me wasn't just pie-in-the-sky dreaming, I proved I could hang. I was hardcore.
Contrary to popular belief, they were not all dicks to each other. They were not a bunch of people who hated each other that banded together anyway because they needed to for success. They were just as fun and congenial as any guild mates I have ever met; they just had that drive to be the best.
When WotLK was nearing a close I came to a point in my life that required lots of change and upheaval. I moved cross-country and started a job that worked me 12 hours a day. Needless to say I had to stop raiding. At least for a while. When I settled in and came back to WoW I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. I had always had the heart of a hardcore raider, recently had been able to fulfill that heart's desire, and knew without a doubt that I was not going to be able to do that again. Real life is way more important and I no longer have the time.
This is not going to change any time soon. I was offered a spot with Relax in Cataclysm, which I declined due to aforementioned lack of time. The idea of starting my own guild from scratch again didn't seem fun. I knew what was coming in Cata with regards to difficulty and how the game was going to change. Knowing that, the prospect of retraining a bunch of people who learned how to play for the first time in WotLK was a big turn-off. As I was musing over what to do, I got a call from an old friend. He had played with me since TBC and was with me all the way through WotLK, right up until I quit HotC. When I quit HotC, he had also quit. He had become Horde and was now raiding in his cousin's guild. He wanted me to come raid with him. As he explained their raid days/times, the attitude of the raiders, and what the guild was like it all started sounding pretty good.
So here I am in Cata, I am geared to the teeth for raiding. Completely min/maxed. I have power-leveled new professions because their bonuses are now the best for my class/spec. And I cannot raid. Due to my real life schedule I am not able to make the raid days of this new guild. So I am left with a few choices: make my own guild, find a new guild, or stop raiding. I don't know what I will do.
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P.S. Heroes of the Command is still on Dalaran. I am still friends with one of their officers. They have changed. Over the course of time they have decided that being so casual is not what they want and they are back at going for the gold. If you are interested In joining them then I suggest you make a level one alt on their server and whisper someone in the guild. I recommend them to anyone who is not willing to/doesn't desire to be super hardcore, but wants a competent group of raiders that gets content cleared. As for me, I have burned too many bridges there, and am not entirely convinced that I would be happy there if I did go back.
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